Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in “The Logic of Sensation”

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is the record of Deleuze’s confrontation with the work of the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon (1909–92).The book originally appeared in 1981, when Bacon and Deleuze were both at the height of their powers. Although already well known at the time, Bacon was hardly a canonical painter and was even suspect in certain circles for his figural leanings. When Deleuze’s book appeared, it received a number of favorable reviews, but then was largely passed over in silence.Today, however, The Logic of Sensation has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. It was the first book Deleuze published after his decade-long collaboration with Félix Guattari on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In the following years, Deleuze would publish a number of works on the arts, including the two-volume Cinema (1983, 1985), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), and the writings on literature collected in Essays Critical and Clinical (1993). The Logic of Sensation can thus be read not only as a philosophical study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art.

Deleuze insisted that he wrote on the arts, not as a critic, but as a philosopher, and that his works on the various arts must therefore be read as works of “philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.”In What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze famously defines philosophy as an activity that consists in the creation of concepts. “One can very easily think without concepts, but as soon as there is a concept, there is truly philosophy” (N 32).